Friday, April 15, 2016

What Exactly is a Bot?

The word Bot has started to be used again. But what is it? I was struck by Matt Galligan's piece in Medium which takes a broad look at the definition. We built one that for a short time in the 80s represented a major brand's equity. See the 'Mr Clean' link tag below for more on that. A Bot to us meant a system that interacted with you. It did not attempt to fool you into think it was intelligent, but clearly had a hint of AI, and in the end gave you some value for interacting. Such a system could have access to as much knowledge and logic as necessary to make it of value.